The opening weeks of the Spanish Civil War were characterized by horrendous atrocities, most of them inflicted by an inflamed working class upon conservatives in general and Catholic clergy in particular. Ultimately, 12 bishops and hundreds of priests and nuns and seminarians were slaughtered. The reprisals taken by the nationalists were as brutal, though usually less picturesque in their cruelty. Europe looked on in horror as a country once recognized as the center of Western Civilization descended into bloodshed on a scale not seen since the ghastly events of WWI. The new tank warfare tactics and the terror bombing of cities from the air were features of the Spanish Civil War which later was a significant part in the general European War. The Spanish Civil War had cost the nation somewhere between 600,000 - 800,000 lives, counting deaths in battle and executions, as well as civilians killed by bombing, starvation, and disease. Under the new regime thousands more would be condemned to death, imprisoned, or forced into exile. The war ended with the victory of the rebels, who called themselves the Nationalists, the overthrow of the Republican government, and the exile of thousands of Spanish Republicans, many of whom ended up in refugee camps in Southern France. Apart from the combatants, many civilians were killed for their political or religious views by both sides.
27.1 For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel after the Spanish American War, a historic fiction, titled For Whom the Bell Tolls. He borrowed the title from a line of a John Donne poem. The novel tells the story of Robert Jordan, a guerrilla warrior from the United States, during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, Jordan is given an assignment to blow up a bridge to accompany a simultaneous attack on the city of Segovia. Though successful in that sense, like most Hemingway novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls is tragic.